There was a crow with a massive head tumour who was barely able to fly or walk straight at one place I lived. The other crows would bring it food and groom it. He'd sit on the front lawn making a funny noise while another crow was always next to him.

FunkOut:There was a crow with a massive head tumour who was barely able to fly or walk straight at one place I lived. The other crows would bring it food and groom it. He'd sit on the front lawn making a funny noise while another crow was always next to him.

It's depressing how the wildlife is adopting our welfare state. A healthy ecosystem is better patterned after an industrial slaughter house since death is how life is fed.

FunkOut:There was a crow with a massive head tumour who was barely able to fly or walk straight at one place I lived. The other crows would bring it food and groom it. He'd sit on the front lawn making a funny noise while another crow was always next to him.

Albert911emt:keypusher: Is there any evidence in the article that the rest of the pod is sharing food?

Yeah. The disabled whale isn't dead yet.

He's still young. I hope they're able to track him to see if the pod allows him to stay once he's of the normal age where they push related males out of the pod. Animals that have supportive social groups can seemingly be very tolerant of disabilities, but it's usually due to the mother's status (which often gives the baby high rank in the group), and the animal's status as a juvenile.

What made humans (and other human like groups, like Neanderthal) unique is that there are fossil instances of males and females suffering serious injury or congential deformation that only survived due to the group caring for them beyond a short scope of time and beyond childhood when they seemingly had no use to the group. No one knows how common this was, or if the few instances seen are anomalies. But it doesn't happen with most animals of course.

Not every social group shares this even. There's writings by Julius Ceasar during his campaigns where he's basically disgusted that the Celts keep mentally retarded children. He's not the only one to have written about it, but these writings I understand are the only reason we even know about it. If a family wasn't taking proper care of a disabled relative, the person was taken, placed with another family in the village, and the original family had to pay financial support and it was seen as a great shame. They didn't do this out of a sense of heightened morality, they weren't more enlightened than the romans or anything. It was simply a different social concept of family and kinship bonds. They probably wouldn't have given two shiats about a disabled roman child...but one of their own was different.